Newsletter #31 mailed out New Year's 2006

Dear People,

You can take this newsletter as sort of a little placeholder while I catch my breath between major projects. I did polish and turn in Some Golden Harbor, the 5th RCN novel. It's scheduled as a Baen hc for September, 2006. The excellent cover by Steve Hickman is at http://david-drake.com/news.html.

Some Golden Harbor is quite different from earlier volumes in the series, by the way. That fact is neither good nor bad in absolute terms, but it's very good that I keep stretching myself instead of doing the same thing over and over again. That means that sometimes I'm going to fall on my face--but I learn from my failures also, which makes my later work better. (Well, I think it does. And I'm the one who gets to make the decision.)

And speaking of stretching, I did a Hammer novelette, The Darkness. After initial publication in Jim Baen's UNIVERSE (of which more later), it'll be collected in the third and final volume of The Complete Hammer's Slammers from Night Shade Books (also of which more later). It's a very complex story which I wouldn't have been able to write ten years ago. Every day in every way I am becoming better and better.... (As a writer, that is.)

Jim Baen's UNIVERSE is a new on-line SF magazine edited by Eric Flint. The first issue comes out in June, but we are ready to take your money now. Go to http://www.baensuniverse.com/ and subscribe now before what we hope is going to be a big rush when the major advertising goes out.

The first of the three Night Shade Hammer volumes has slipped to January, 2006, (from the scheduled December, 2005), but it really is at the printers. There's a PDF image of the cover layout which you can download at http://david-drake.com/news.html; the art is by John Berkey. Personally I like the yellow palette (very similar to that of the original Hammer's Slammers in April, 1979), though it's startled some of those who've seen it.

The introductions to the three Night Shade volumes, by Barry N Malzberg, Gene Wolfe, and David Hartwell, appear in the October, 2005, issue of The New York Review of Science Fiction (issue # 206). Information on ordering copies is available at http://www.NYRSF.com.

It's a matter of enormous pride to me that folks of such literary stature took the time to write these intros. In addition to being award-winning writers, Barry and Gene are both veterans, while David as well as being a major editor is a scholar whose doctorate is in Medieval English Literature. Their approaches to my work are thus different, but they're equally remarkable. I'm very conscious of the honor.

I should mention that I wrote an essay on The Year of the Sex Olympics by Nigel Kneale, for Horror: Another 100 Best Books, edited by Steve Jones and Kim Newman. I recommend the book (just out) and its predecessor (Horror: 100 Best Books) as expansive overviews of what quirky, intelligent literary people find evocative. In the current volume, for example, I note that KW Jeter is as big a fan of George Gissing's 1891 novel, New Grub Street, as I am.

My next project is The New Land, the second volume of The Crown of the Isles Trilogy. I'm staring at my rough setting, figuring out where to start. I'm going to read some Polybius and/or some Dionysius of Halicarnassus, hoping to kick off trains of thoughts that'll give me business for the novel. The puzzling thing is that the ancient historians seem to give me better backgrounds for space operas and Military SF than they do fantasies set in a milieu very similar to that of the historical one (albeit where magic is more effective than it is in the real world). I'm not sure what that should be.

Which brings up a point: I used to get very depressed because I couldn't understand how I plot and then develop a complex novel. Due in large measure to a discussion with my friend Mark Van Name, this no longer bothers me. (Well, it doesn't bother me much.) I've come to accept the fact that I do plot and develop novels successfully. It isn't my job to analyze how I go about that, so it shouldn't concern me that I can't analyze it.

Still, it'd be nice if I had a little more of a glimmering of where I'm going with this one. Oh, well. I will before long.

As a general comment, 2005 was a very stressful year for me and a thoroughly bad year for a lot of people. I hope all of you have a kinder, gentler 2006; and I hope I do too.

All best,
Dave Drake

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